


Atlantic

by plasticdaisy



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst, Drama & Romance, Drowning, Fairy Tale Retellings, Humanstuck, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Little Mermaid Elements, M/M, Pirates, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-09
Updated: 2020-02-09
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:15:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22623919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plasticdaisy/pseuds/plasticdaisy
Summary: Dave is washed off of his ship during a storm, and finds himself waking up in the arms of a beautiful stranger.For my boyfriend.
Relationships: Dave Strider/Karkat Vantas
Comments: 2
Kudos: 69





	Atlantic

**Author's Note:**

  * For [KittyMotor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KittyMotor/gifts).



There’s something about the sea that makes it infinitely calming and terrifying all at once. I look out on the water and see two decades of a silence I haven’t grown used to – it dances across the waves, swallowing the light from the sun and the rain from the clouds.

I wonder often if I was born in the ocean, but sometimes it feels like I wasn’t born at all. My older brother, with a body of stone and a personality of ice, is my first memory. He taught me how to tack, how to reef, and how to hold a sword. I must’ve been under ten when I learned how run from bow to stern while the boat heeled in the wind, dashing across the slick deck and ducking underneath swinging sails.

I am eighteen years old, now, and any boat is more home to me than the land has ever been. My brother has stolen – and captained – many boats in the time I have been alive. He doesn’t abandon them for any reason other than finding a faster, more sea-worthy ship. I have never seen a boat sink, but I have seen things that make my stomach churn at the memory of them.

I have seen men swallowed by the sea, sucked away by hurricanes or pushed overboard. I have seen men pierced through the heart and skull by cutlasses, and I have seen men thrown into the waves when their skin began to fail them from illness. I have seen them cry for help as they drown. I have seen my brother alter the course away from their breaking bodies.

I have never seen a boat sink until today – and it happens slowly, very slowly, before it happens all at once.

“… There’s a _hole_ ,” someone said to my brother, in a hushed whisper, while I was sitting in our shared quarters, slicing an orange. The man was hushed, moved away, dismissed. I thought that would be the end of the situation – my brother had manned too many ships to not know how to fix a hole.

You can feel when there’s something wrong with the ship, somewhere deep inside of you. It’s like when you’re a child who is afraid of the dark, of some monster told to you in a tale spread through the lips of thousands of sailors. Every sound in your quarters becomes a threat, any flash of light outside the call of an evil witch or siren. The stars swallow you whole, and when the sun rises, you realize that you lost sleep over nothing at all.

It’s been a few hours since the announcement of the hole, which seemed like a cry that’s long faded into the wind, a threat lingering underneath us like the sea. The creaks of the ship suddenly make my stomach seize and drop, and the shaking beneath my feet becomes almost unbearable, though it’s something I’ve become so used to over the years. I almost trip as I duck underneath one of the masts, which is being yanked hard to starboard.

“Watch yourself, Dave,” my brother hisses, looking out at the darkening sky. I can see how his brow furrows – something is wrong. He shouldn’t get worried. He _doesn’t_ get worried.

I see it, then: the lightning breaking across the cloudy sky. Thunder roars, and I realize that the darkness hasn’t come with the night. It came hurling in on the tail end of a storm, and we aren’t ready for it. The waves are beginning to act up, and the salt in the air is muddled with the scent of rain. It’s cold. It’s so, so cold.

“We’re not ready for this, are we,” I look to my brother, who still wears a gruff expression. I speak without the lilt of a question, knowing all too well that he doesn’t respond well to curiosity. It’s for children, and I’ve never been allowed to be a child.

He turns around with the ferocity of the approaching storm, his boots echoing with claps of thunder as he makes his way across the ship, barking out orders. He gives none to me, and I wonder if it’s because I’m not ready – because I’m not good enough. Something in my chest tightens. I feel frozen in a moment where it feels like every second counts.

The boat wails, in pain with the crashing waves. The ground beneath me shakes, but I can’t bear to reach out to steady myself. Everything around me is moving quickly, ahead of me, and I am above myself, around myself, outside myself. I am a pillar of timelessness. Groaning, the boat tips to the starboard side, and the wind is knocked out of me as a wave comes crashing onto the deck, pushing me onto the ground.

The ocean pulls me towards her, one of her hands wrapped around my legs and the other intertwined with my panic. Someone is calling my name – not my brother, but another member of the crew. I force my head above the water in resignation to an instinct to survive, but I can feel my insides twist and fall to my feet as I leave the boat behind, following the wave back into the sea.

It hits my back with a force that fills my lower body with pain, and, suddenly, the white film over the world melts away, and I am moving in time with the world around me. I claw at the water, fighting desperately to stay above the churning waves. Splinters and slabs of wood are beginning to break from the building holes and cracks in the ship’s body, and they attack me almost as fiercely as the waves.

It’s cold. So, so cold. I tire too easily – I can’t give up, but I can’t keep fighting the water. My muscles tense as I sink beneath it, the waves too strong for me to push my head back to the surface. I close my eyes. They ache with the saltwater. My whole body aches.

The sea is dark, cold, and deep. When I force my eyes open, the world is blurry. Wood and little gold trinkets and coins swirl around me. I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, _I can’t breathe_.

My head begins to feel like it’s a little sea, swirling and full of discarded debris and men thrown overboard. My vision greys. I see a flash of red, and then I see nothing. 

—

“… Hear me?”

A strange voice fills the fishbowl in my head with streaks of orange and pink.

The world and my body reappear all at once to me, an overwhelming set of feelings I can’t quite comprehend. I can feel sand coating my skin, which aches with the cold of the sea and my wet clothes. My head is spinning and throbbing with pain, and when I fight to open my eyes, the light pours into my vision too hard and too fast.

The sky is blue and blurry, and there’s a face looking down at me – so close that I can barely see further than the stranger’s chest.

I feel a rush of panic flood my body, but my limbs don’t respond, and I just tense.

“… Who are you?” I manage, and my voice feels like it’s melted under layers of molasses. The man above me comes into focus with the feeling in my hands returning to me – I reach up, pushing my hair out of my face.

He’s different than any man I’ve seen before; sickly, living, or altered by injury. His skin is greyish but has so many undertones that it reminds me of the surface of the sea before a quiet, calm rain. The kind of storm where the sky stays blue and the clouds paint the setting sun, which reflects over the ocean as it ripples.

I feel like I’ve known him before – not that I’ve seen him, but that I’ve felt him. He feels like he’s existed for my entire lifetime, rising and falling in my sky like the sun and the moon at the same time.

His ears are pointed and as he glances at me, his lips part slightly, revealing an array of sharp teeth. His skin is slick with water, but not quite like it sticks to mine. His hair looks like it would curl if it wasn’t wet, as the sun beating down on the two of us has caused it to dry into little, wispy waves.

“It doesn’t matter,” he responds, and his voice sounds like a melody I’ve not yet heard, spinning my mind in a circle that makes my chest feel light and warm. His eyes flick up and down my body, “I’m glad you’re alive.”

“What happened?” I mutter, the temporary ecstasy of looking this odd stranger in the face fading as pain pulses through my body. I force myself up on my elbows, and the man edges backward awkwardly.

“I –” the man begins, but something like fear flashes across his face. I feel the air leave my lungs as he pushes me back down into the sand. Something scrapes across my skin as I hear the sound of water breaking. I close my eyes. My chest stings.

“Dave.”

That voice is familiar. I feel something touch my arm, and I force my eyes open again. My brother’s towering figure is framed by the blue sky. His left arm is wrapped in a bandage, and his legs are covered in sand. His face is as stony as ever. Compared to the stranger I saw just moments ago, he feels so far away. I suppose he’s always felt far away.

“Wh—”

He doesn’t let me finish.

“We lost the ship. Everything on it, too. Only three of us survived – four including you, I guess. You got lucky, however you washed up here.”

_Someone saved me_ , I want to say, but I know he wouldn’t care, so I leave the feeling in my head, pink and yellow and grey and blue.

“You’ve got a scrape on your chest,” he points out, “you’d best get a new shirt. We’re staying at an inn just a mile or two from here. I came by to see if any of our gold washed ashore. Didn’t find anything valuable.”

“Mm,” I grunt.

“Get up. We’re going to have to get another ship in the next few days, and I can’t have you crawling around it like a sick bastard. You have to do your part.”

I nod, forcing myself to sit up. My head spins. He’s going to need to me to cut the rope on whatever ship he decides to steal, and I pray to something I don’t believe in that the ache in my back and ribs will fade, otherwise I won’t be able to jump the side of the ship.

My brother seems to notice I’m still somewhat incapacitated, and he makes a sound of disapproval, disappearing from my field of view. I can hear his heavy footsteps even on the sand.

“Find your way into town,” he barks.

And like that, he’s gone. I curl up a little, the sand warm on my feet and the sun warm on my shoulders. The rest of me is still cold. I look out at the sea, a place I once called home, and feel unsettled. The calm inside it has disappeared, swallowed somewhere when the waves pulled me under.

My mind falls back to the stranger I saw, who feels a little like a dream. After all, no one has pointed ears and skin like the setting sun on the crystal waves. No one has teeth like his, a lilt in their voice that sounds like how it might feel to hear for the first time.

I shake my head as if it will push him away from me. Perhaps he was a hallucination. Perhaps I was just washed ashore by luck alone, forced back under the steady hand of my brother. Forced back into men overboard, into swords and cutlasses, into running across soaked wood and underneath swinging masts.

I never do walk back into town.

The sun dries my clothes, and somehow the appeal of the cool night air wandering from out of sea is more comforting than seeing my brother again. I sit on the beach for a day and a half, and I find solace in the fact that he won’t come back for me. I wonder if he found someone smaller and faster, someone willing to bend underneath him like I did. Someone he can show how to fight, how to man a ship, how to steal.

I wander the length of the beach on the second day, feeling hunger well up in my stomach. It turns from sand to jagged rocks, and large trees hover over me, seeming to swallow the sun in a similar way to the waves of the sea. I sit down on one of the flatter rocks, running my hands through my hair, which is thick and waxy with salt and sand. A part of me is content to stay on the beach forever, melting into the rocks and letting the sun swallow my withering figure whole.

“I don’t think you want to die,” says a voice from beside me, and I’m thrown my thoughts as I jump, whipping my head around. There’s a woman standing beside me, holding a cutlass and wrapped in fine leather and blue cloth. Her hat dips down over her eyes, and as she takes a seat to my right, the scent of salt in the air thickens.

“… I don’t want any trouble,” I murmur, rubbing my arms and scrambling to stand, “I don’t have any money for you.”

“I’m not looking for money,” she purrs, “don’t be so hasty. Where else do you have to go? Back to your brother?”

“How do you know about that?”

I continue to back away as she continues, pushing herself onto her feet.

“Do you have the right to ask? Are you not relying on the kindness of strangers? Are you not thinking of the one who pulled you from the sea?”

I freeze, and I watch her mouth twist into a grin just beneath the shadow of her wide, tilted hat. We both know she’s hooked me, and my curiosity – something for children, something I’m suddenly allowed to have – is only tugging on the line.

“What can you tell me about him?”

“I can tell you that he was real,” she takes a step towards me, slowly, and though I feel the urge to step back, I resist it. “I can tell you that he’s something from stories you’ve been told.”

My head spins with tales of lone islands, mermaids, sea monsters, and women who create the wind with their breath.

“… And you are, too.”

“I have my fair share of shanties,” she replies nonchalantly, “I’m very good at what I do.”

“What is that?”

My insides curl a little, but all I can think about is pink waves.

“That stranger,” she murmurs, “the one who saved you – I can take you to him, let you see him again. I know you want to. Love is a strange thing, isn’t it? I can see it in your eyes, yet you only knew him for a moment.”

“It feels like a lifetime,” I find myself saying, though the words seemed to materialize in my throat and crawl out of their accord.

“Do we have a deal?”

“There’s a catch,” I furrow my brow, “tell me.”

She laughs, a sinister sound that crashes like a black wave during a storm.

“You’re smart. I like it. There is a catch,” she steps towards me again, too close, “you can’t come back.”

I don’t know from where, but something tells me I won’t get to. My eyes flick back in the direction of the town, where my brother might still be, waiting for me. It’s been two and a half days, and I feel a tinge of hesitation at the thought of him sitting in that hotel room, waiting for me to walk in – perhaps the stubbornness of the persona he’s built for himself holding him back for coming to find me. I am his family, after all.

The thought crumbles like the base of our ship, splintering into images of the man I somehow know him to be, despite the rosy shades I’ve tried to paint over him for so long. His cruel stare, our infrequent conversations – he trained me to work for him, not to be his brother. He didn’t teach me how to read, he didn’t ask me what I liked, he didn’t patch me up when I was hurt.

He hurt me so I could teach myself.

My eyes fall back on the woman standing before me, with her crooked smile and her aura of the dark, cool blue of the deep ocean. How is it that she calls out to me and I feel inclined to answer, more than I feel inclined to see the only person I’ve seen every day for the past eighteen years? How is it that the promise of seeing a stranger – a hallucination, even – who saved my life one time is more valuable than a lifetime spent with someone I’m supposed to love?

It’s something I’ll have to learn, I think; something that I’m already starting to learn. An un-loving of someone who never returned it in the first place.

“We have a deal.”

She nods, and suddenly the world explodes into blue light. For a moment, I see who she truly is, but it disappears in a flash. The sea witch who works in a dichotomy of blessings and curses, that rush at you all at once.

When my eyes adjust, everything feels lighter, _colder_. My eyes don’t ache, and my skin doesn’t burn, and my back doesn’t splinter with pain. I try to take a deep breath, and my lungs feel strange. I realize where I am when they fill with water instead of air. I gasp, fear enveloping me.

I’m not drowning. I’m _not_ drowning.

I look around, and feel the water skirt across my face, my hair melting into the current of the sea. It feels magical, in the same exhilarating way it feels to spar with someone. It feels dangerous.

I try to move my legs to tread the water, but I’m met with another upheaval of reality as I realize that they’ve been replaced by a tail. It moves in a more fluid motion than I ever think my legs could, and I twist myself experimentally until I’m able to move forward, propelling myself into the open water.

After a lap of swimming, exhilaration burning through me, I’m hit with the sudden realization of my purpose – to find my savior. And, as I look out into the open ocean, it seems that the sea witch dropped me miles and miles from the shore.

If my savior is out here, I don’t know where he is.

The sea is wide, vast, and terrifying. In a way, it seems to calm me, but it fills me with a sudden hopelessness I can’t seem to reign in. I traded away the life I knew so well on a whim, and looking back, I’m not entirely sure I was leaving nothing behind.

“… What are you doing here?” says a voice – one I know now, one laced with pink and yellow and red – and I turn around, the breath leaving me as I see the man who pulled me onto the shore.

He looks even more elegant underwater, and I wonder if it’s even possible for him to grow more beautiful. I can see the glimmer in his eyes and across his skin, his hair even more curly when it’s entirely submerged than when it’s drying in the sun. I can see now he has freckles and shimmering, brown eyes.

His arms are crossed, and I can see how naturally his skin seems to fade into the red scales of his tail, which is a similar color to mine – but a deeper, more passionate, more fiery red.

“I wanted to find you,” I respond, somewhat blankly. His eyes skate across me once more, as they did when we first met. I wonder if he sees the same glimmer in my skin as I see in his.

“You made a deal with the sea witch,” he states, his brow furrowing, “… just to see me again? What the hell is wrong with you?”

I try to swallow my pride, remembering the catch.

My feelings may not be returned. I may be stuck in the sea, alone, wandering – in a place I once called home from above. I may live a life being equally as terrified as I am in wonder. And what about when the wonder fades? When the sea is just vast and lonely?

“I don’t know,” is the only reply I can muster, knowing I’m riding on a lottery I’m not sure I’ll win – though, in the end, what did I have to lose?

“What did you give?”

“… My life, I guess,” I murmur, “whatever that’s worth.”

The stranger looks at me, searching my face. His expression begs me to continue, so I swallow the thickness in my thought.

“I guess I thought if I saw you, it was a chance at something else, something I’ve been looking for this whole damn time. I mean, I led a life that was … I don’t know. I don’t even know what I’m looking for. I guess wherever I go, I’m a waste.”

“You’ve got it wrong.”

“I don’t get what you mean.”

“Why do you think I pulled you out of the water? That wasn’t the first time I saw you, you know. You travel a lot, but I do too – and there’s something about you. Something that makes you different from everyone else. And when you looked up at me on that beach, it felt kind of like you saw something like that in me, too. I … I was hoping you’d find me, some way or another.”

“That’s why you stuck around.”

The man nods, his eyes soft as he looks at me.

“It feels like I’ve known you for longer than I can understand,” he says.

“That’s what I thought, too.”

“I can’t imagine I’m worth trading your life away, no matter what it was.”

I move closer to him, letting my hand wander up to his cheek. His skin is soft, and his eyes dart across my face. They’re so warm – warmer than the sun.

“I think I’m not the only one who’s got it wrong,” I mutter, and I thumb across his skin as his brow furrows and he tilts his head away. “I saw you, and somehow … I just knew you were worth the world.”

His lip twitches into a little smile, and though I never thought I’d believe in love at first sight, it doesn’t feel like this counts. It feels like I’ve known him for a lifetime, like I’ve seen him in the sky and the sun and the stars and the waves. It feels like he steered my ship home, out into a sea that is vast and forgiving.

“I’m Dave, by the way.”

“Karkat.”

“Can I kiss you?” I ask quietly, letting my voice lilt into the question. He nods, slowly, and I let other hand wander around his waist, pulling him in as I press my lips against his, delicately and slowly. It feels like we pass galaxies between us, creating the wind and the thunder and the rain on our own sea. We pull apart, and I feel something deep in my chest. He pulls me in for another kiss – I melt into it like the sun melts into the waves.

There’s something about the sea that makes it feel infinitely calming and terrifying all at the same time, but I don’t think I’m scared anymore.

**Author's Note:**

> clearly this was inspired by elements of the little mermaid but reversed? haha. can you tell i know nothing about boats
> 
> named after the song atlantic by sleeping at last, i recommend the entire album - atlas: year one.


End file.
